Meta-science discussions about the replication crisis in psychology
In this talk, I will present a work-in-progress from my PhD project in the history and philosophy of psychology. In the project, I investigate the disciplinary formation of psychology from 1950 to 1999 through the lens of research methodology. I approach it in two ways: from the perspective of research output (large-scale data mining of approx. 670.000 research articles’ titles and abstracts) and, in Kuhnian terms, pedagogical indoctrination into the discipline (content analysis of introductory textbooks to psychology). The last step in my project is an analysis of how psychologists debate and discuss contemporary controversies in their research practice, or more specifically, how they use general philosophies of science in those debates. Usually, this is framed as the practicing scientists (researchers) receiving and applying more general philosophies of science – for example using the Kuhnian account of the development of paradigms as a normative standard for evaluating their own discipline. My analysis is different in that I follow Laurence Smith’s perspective from his research on the reception of logical positivism by the American behaviorists, where logical positivism wasn’t the model philosophy of science which legitimized or even described the research of the behaviorists. It functioned as a philosophers’ description of science that was compared and contrasted to the “homegrown” epistemology that arose out the research program of the behaviorist himself (be it B.F. Skinner, Tolman, or Hull). In my case study, I will take the same approach and apply it to the current replication crisis debates and their uses of Popper’s falsificationism, and see how Popper’s philosophy is strategically used in most replicationists’ discussions. With these examples, I plan to draw some conclusions on the (mis)uses of philosophy of science as both descriptions and normative standards for scientific practice by psychologists in their meta-discussions about the replication crisis.
